3 movies demonstrate how meanest streets are paved with inequality

Some Los Angeles neighborhoods went up in flames after the Rodney King verdict in 1992. John Ridley's documentary "Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992" explores these events.

Some Los Angeles neighborhoods went up in flames after the Rodney King verdict in 1992. John Ridley's documentary "Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992" explores these events. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

A more expansive version of the documentary that aired in April on ABC, the spectacularly good “Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992,”screens this weekend, one time only, as part of the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Black Harvest Film Festival. In his LA story, writer-director John Ridley (Oscar winner for “12 Years a Slave”) accomplishes what straightforward nonfiction narrative can do in the best of circumstances: Canvas a huge historical event, lend it context, but populate it with witnesses and participants who give that event a beating heart.

By the 42-minute mark of writer-director Ridley’s film, we may dread the introduction of Rodney King but we’re ready for it. We’ve been prepared: We’ve seen how the controversial and often lethal Los Angeles Police Department chokehold tactics stoked the fires of resentment in so many communities of color. We’ve seen how the 1984 Olympics brought out, temporarily, a sunnier atmosphere of camaraderie in LA. We’ve met the key players in “Let It Fall,” though only gradually do we learn their precise role in the April 1992 explosion.

We see the amateur video footage of the baton-wielding LAPD officers clubbing a clearly nonthreatening King, dozens of times. Here was irrefutable evidence, eventually refuted.

The “not guilty” verdicts of those police officers in April 1992 set pockets of Los Angeles ablaze and cost many lives and $1 billion worth of property damage. Ridley’s documentary puts all sorts of people on camera, from the assailants of trucker Reginald Denny to LAPD officers (none of the King assailants, unfortunately; none agreed to participate) who speak to policing under the baton of longtime LAPD chief Daryl Gates. A hated figure in many of LA’s communities, Gates got the verdict on the Rodney King case he wanted. And then he retired.

The violence runs in every direction here, and the moral currents are muddy, troubling, infinitely complicated. Nothing that we see in “Let It Fall” can be contained, really. It speaks to its time, and to this one.

“Whose Streets?” from filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis takes on a more recent conflagration, the August 2014 slaying of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Mo., and the Black Lives Matter movement that grew and spread in response to that fatal police shooting. “LA 1992,” one Ferguson citizen mutters early in the documentary, referring to the uprising swirling around her. “It’s just so sad, man.”

“Whose Streets?” is an impassioned polemic, narrower in focus and impact than “Let It Fall.” But both films are vital, alive and alert to the bloody blur of American history. They aren’t black stories, or only black stories. The authorial voice in both documentaries happens to be black, though, and that is hardly incidental.

It’s a different matter with “Detroit,” a fictionalized account of the 1967 upheaval there and another galling example of indefensibly deadly police force.The screenwriter, Mark Boal, and the director, Kathryn Bigelow, are white. Many have cited that fact as a reason the movie seems well-meaning but thwarted and blinkered in its perspective.

I’m still wrestling with this viewpoint. On the one hand, commercial and creative artists and documentarians have every right to explore every human story, whatever their race and background and sensibility. On the other hand, black voices matter, because we haven’t heard enough of them. Access is all. This is why the film industry, as we know it through the emblem and the gatekeeper known as Hollywood, has taken so long to respond to the diminishing returns of a majority culture. The people in power enjoy their power, and they do not want to share, unless they’re either shamed into it or they’re reminded, cyclically, that there’s money to be made in recognizing talent, subjects and audiences of every sort.

“Detroit” comes from one of America’s strongest directors. I think her work here is full of honest anguish and honest misjudgments in roughly equal measure. The film is undercut by a screenplay that scrambles to establish its main players in conventionally written ways, while conveying a creeping sense of dread regarding the Algiers Motel police interrogation and torture. Almost any movie, by a director of any color, any ethnicity, any skill level, would struggle to find a wide popular audience with this subject. The closure never comes. Then again, that’s one of Bigelow’s greatest assets as a storyteller: In all three films of her unofficial war trilogy, “The Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Detroit,” she refuses the audience-placating button on a story that shows no sign of actually ending.

To put it in context: “Detroit” is a long way from a blood-boiling fraud such as director Alan Parker’s 1988 “Mississippi Burning,” which a generation ago imagined wrongly that the civil rights movement was put into motion by a couple of white guys, while the African-Americans stood around, mutely staring.

The valiantly humane overview of “Let It Fall” neither overheats nor sidelines the worst of what happened in April 1992. Ridley folds archival footage, news copter blather and his own, fresh interviews together in oral-history form. The longer version of the documentary playing in Chicago this weekend justifies each and every minute not found in the shorter version.

He didn’t set out to answer the title of the Ferguson documentary, but Ridley makes sense of how the blood got there, on streets that should, by human rights, belong to everyone.

“Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992” screens at 8 p.m. Saturday as part of the Gene Siskel Film Center’s annual Black Harvest Film Festival. 164 N. State St.; www.siskelfilmcenter.org/blackharvest.